Dear Claudia,
I just wrote Diane Pike; we’ll see what happens. I’d already written her and got back a Love Project card. I will keep you informed; she sounds trippy and sweet.
Love works! Always! That’s what the card says. I can dig it. Can’t you? Where do we begin? (The La Paz bar.)
Claudia, this is an addendum to my previous letter of Friday. John Calvin (1509–1564) gives this statement which beyond all doubt describes my experience and my thoughts about it afterward:
. . . The natural talents in man have been corrupted by sin, but of the supernatural ones he has been wholly deprived. . . . Therefore, when he revolted from the divine government, he was at the same time deprived of those supernatural endowments which had been given him for the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is exiled from the Kingdom of God, in such a manner that all the affections relating to the happy life of the soul are also extinguished in him, till he recovers them by the grace of regeneration. . . . All these things, being restored by Christ, are esteemed adventitious and preternatural; and therefore we conclude that they had been lost (Ital. mine). Again: soundness of mind and rectitude of heart were also destroyed; and this is the corruption of the natural talents. For although we retain some portion of understanding and judgment together with the will, yet we cannot say that our mind is perfect and sound. . . . Being a natural talent, it could not be totally destroyed, but is partly debilitated. . . .*
Also, I read something fascinating in the Monitor yesterday, an article about Lewis Mumford.25 (How can a man with no college degrees be all bad?) Mumford says:
I think this must be very much like what happened during the transition from the Roman civilization, which was highly organized and bent on the same ends as our civilization, power, productivity, prestige, to the Christian era. The Christians formed in little bands. They began to withdraw from society and accepted the poverty which only slaves then were forced to accept. They built up a spiritual foundation for their life which gave them the internal energy firmly to take over the Roman Empire.
If you remember my mentioning it, Claudia, when this first hit me in March I looked around and saw Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars—just what Mumford expresses above. That I saw this in an instant (“in the twinkling of an eye”) is and was not of my doing; it didn’t come out of my mind, my mental processes; it wasn’t a concept or even an awareness internally: I perceived it. I saw it. I pierced the veil, so to speak, and saw my society exactly as it is . . . which is, as Mumford expresses, like Rome was. What puzzled me was, since I knew intellectually that Rome was a city in Italy and an empire and republic back before Christ, then where was I, in Fullerton or back there, now or back then? Again, the [question is “is] it this or is it that,” and the answer is, “it is both.” In Mumford’s sense, “Rome” is a paradigm. I was so to speak taken up on the mountain, a metaphor in itself, and shown. “See?” the Spirit said. “What do you see all around you? You see Rome.”
I was amazed, troubled, and fucked up. It was a dreadful sight: a slave state, like Gulag.
There is no doubt in my mind now that my “vision” of my society was accurate in the sense that Mumford means it; I hadn’t gone back in time, but in a sense Rome had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again. Look! The Christians conquered Rome, but only for a time; Rome swallowed up its conquerors, like China does. At last Rome began by stealthy degrees to surface once more, to manifest itself. Therefore it is not surprising that that same Holy Spirit which rose against it then, in 100 or so A.D., has returned to arouse us as before, as it roused our ancestors, metaphorically speaking. It is the trumpet call to fight once more for freedom.* Like Mumford says.
Well, I got to go because a lot of publicans and sinners, tax collectors and other riffraff abound, and I must deal with them.
Love,
Phil
P.S. I tell you, Claudia, Calvin is right; we’re (1) missing entirely certain faculties and (2) what we have, the remaining ones, are very much hazed over. When I saw correctly in March it’s like when you get a new pair of glasses and can read everything, see everything. Really, his distinction is meaningful between the natural faculties such as reason which are fucked up, and the other ones which we can’t even catch a glimpse of until they return. The only thing is, how come this happened? How did we (1) lose certain faculties entirely? and (2) have the remaining ones occluded as they are, for all of us, unless somehow, as in a miracle of healing, they’re restored? Surely there must be a scientific explanation for this, having to do with brain function and dormant sections, inhibited firing of whole neural circuits* . . . and this is precisely what I was trying to achieve back in March, to get neural firing roused, to cause circuits to fire which had never fired. What I think now, with Calvin, is that one time (our childhood? thousands of years ago) they did fire or anyhow were intended to fire, to be firing all this time. But something went wrong. Something dreadful.
At the very least they can be somehow made to fire, finally, whether they ever fired before or not. The next step in human evolution or a lost section of our brains . . . either way the results are outta sight.
[4:131] A human being is a material system which time, a form of energy, enters. Probably time enters him also as noös—Mind.
Time, the future, contains in it all the events which are going to occur. Therefore when time enters a person as energy, and acting as noös to him, it brings with it in potentium all that will happen to him, like a window shade unrolling to display an unfolding pattern. Events in the future pop into being, into actualization, the present, but until they do, they are not truly real—not yet actualized—but there in an encoded form, like the grooves of an LP before the needle reaches it; the only “music” is where the needle touches—ahead lies only an encoded wiggle along a helical spiral. Thus, dreams deal with the future lying direct ahead, as during the night, the next series of encoded future events begin to move toward actualization: i.e., the present. What is hard to realize is that in a certain very real way these events are inside the person, within his head, so to speak; but only in their potential, encoded form; the arena in which they are actualized is that of space; time, in the present, flows out to fill space—i.e., the spatial universe.
This is why we experience déjà vu. We have somehow caught a glimpse now and then of the script unrolling in our head—caught a glimpse in advance, so we feel “I know exactly what I’m going to say next, and what gestures he’ll make,” etc. Sure; they’re encoded—encased, waiting—in time, and time, being energy, has entered you; is burning bright inside, like Blake’s tyger.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night.
. . . Who framed thy awful symmetry?
Or however.
[4:132] The right hemisphere is the seat of the unconscious.
But every layer in it, and all its contents, were at one time part of consciousness, though not of any living men.
These are all the prior left-hemisphere consciousnesses, down through the ages; when they perished, they reappeared in this dormant, sleeping form, not dead, not gone, but not awake: just slumbering, with all their memories and thoughts and experiences and ideas now in dream form.
This is where the dead went. This is where the dead are.
Also, this is the leavening in the bread which Christ spoke of. And the tiny mustard seed, growing and growing.26
Within the right hemisphere (we all share just one among us, like a communal meal—e.g., the Last Supper) this life is rising once more toward the consciousness it lost.
But when it achieves it again, it will be a transformed life, not the perishable one it had.
Being in all of us, and alive and conscious again (it is alive again, but not conscious; it has forgotten), it can’t die. It will not be bound by time or space. It can return to the past, go wherever men are or
ever have been or ever will be.
The experience of anamnesis is the moment when this sleeping mind which once was conscious, remembers its own existence. Who it is remembering is itself; what it is remembering is that it lived and lives now, and has a job to do. Also, it is not a separate entity as the left hemisphere is. Together, they form two appositional minds, linked through it with all the others on Earth and perhaps beyond.*
It did not die; it fell asleep, for two thousand years, acquiring with the death of each new person a new onion-skin like layer of itself; by these slow accretions it grew—toward completeness and reawakening, and remembering.
The moment at which it remembers (is disinhibited by the gold fish sign, the letter, etc.; cf. Epistle of St. Thomas27) is the moment at which the Kingship of God, the Perfect Kingdom, floods back into being: back into awareness of itself, that it is Here; and it is here Now.
It contains within it thousands of years of slumbering world; the “connective unconscious” is becoming conscious, as was foretold by Jesus and Paul and John. It is (again) aware; (again) it thinks. It is Immanent Mind within us and around us, its sensory eyes open, with its identity (via memory restoration) intact. This was the goal of it all: the end of the journey of thousands of years and millions of men.
For those who lived and died, it wasn’t in vain. They slumbered on, adding to one another in millions of laminations of transparencies.
For those, like me, who’re alive, we are suddenly not alone, are suddenly given enormous support; He is with us again, our Savior.
For God’s purposes, the third point in human evolution has now been reached. This moment equals the leap from inanimate to animate in importance; this is true man, man realized at last, this third stage which began 3 million or 4 million years ago—it is not the starting of the stage now, but the perfecting and completing of it. The millions of parts of this entity have wandered about the Earth during a spatial and temporal period of enormity and diversity; but it is all being collected and revived now—collected during these epochs, revived now, by its merely pushing beyond the threshold: it reached saturation point, so to speak, and awoke. (Conscious ness occurs when unconsciousness has been energized to a purely quantitative point, and so passes beyond.)
It possesses immortality (through rebirth). It knows everything (through being gestalted from an almost infinite number of bits throughout space and time). Knowing it can’t err, knowing it can’t die, having a direct relationship with the Logos, or objective reality, or the Plan, it can make decisions partaking of Haggia Sophia: the wisdom of God.
“Haggia Sophia is about to be reborn. She was not acceptable in the past.”* This sentence refers to all of the above, and expresses it. We will have in our midst a wise entity, a sort of organic computer which will surpass its parts and the sum thereof.
“If this could only be done—” It has been done. They killed the Savior almost 2,000 years ago; only to find his face looking out of each person, finally, everywhere. (“The grain of wheat, unless it is planted in the furrow—the grave—leads only its solitary life; but if it is sown, it grows again in splendor.”28) This has all been silently going on behind the scenes all this time—behind the consciousness of all men, this gathering up the defeated: i.e., everyone who died, and everyone did die, so all have been gathered, collected and retained, for this, the Parousia, the Day of Restoration. What good could it be for your possessions to be restored, what you had lost, if you weren’t there too, equally restored?
Teilhard de Chardin speculated that all mankind’s long period of suffering was like the macrocosm of Christ’s Passion, his suffering being a microcosm of mankind’s. Our goal, our death and then release, at last our rebirth into new and better life—he was/is the microcosm of it, the paradigm. Now we, like Christ, have lived through the suffering part and, when we die collectively, we will be restored—collectively.
Is the Day of Wrath, the war, going to kill us all—but then we, like Christ, will be restored in new life afterward? The macrocosm of life here triumphing as He did 1,900 years ago? But like Him, we must go the whole route first, all the way to the Cross, up onto it—to get to the end we must go forward, and not evade or try to escape? This, too, was his message: submit and go through it; it can’t be evaded. It is what lies beyond that is the goal we look for, not retreat from it.
In regard to the question, “Where is He, the Savior, now?” the answer is, “Everywhere,” but in the sense of specific place, nowhere; like NK’s time, he is the universe projected from a single point, and the locus of that point cannot be determined; it is real but it is a constant variable, as He moves among us, through us, and in us—always with us.
That which brings healing, brings energy, brings wisdom: that which brings new life: the springtime for the human being as spring comes for the harvest creatures which are cut down in autumn each year, only to be reborn: the springtime for the human species, too: the Age of Saturn (the Golden Age) again. This which achieves this is Ubik, is the Savior, is the Logos, is God, is Mr. Runciter. Vinland—the new land, where vines grow.
For corn and wheat et al., the cycle is exactly one year, one circle by Earth around the sun. Our species has a longer, slower cycle but cycle it is. For 2,000 years we have labored in the winter of our cycle—maybe longer. But now it passes into spring, which should last quite a while, too.
Mankind is an old root, cut back, long dormant.
Jesus says, “I am that root. And the bright morning star. At the beginning and at the end: to start things off (as Creator) and to direct them along the way (as Logos) and to collect—receive them—at the end, as Holy Spirit. I am.”29
Thoughts while napping: “Hold out/Hold out/We are coming.” (WWII song, we being the Allies to occupied Europe. They were, too; they raised the siege.)
“My outside is just for laughs. My inner self growing, grows wiser every day—wiser and older, surpassing the outer long ago.” (This as insight.)
(St. Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours, anywhere on the world.”30) Thus, this was basis for the above realization: also, my body and the jejune self which goes with it—rather than a split between body and spirit or body and soul, inner or outer in the usual physical-mental—that totality is as the rotting fruit is to the growing seed within; as the fruit rots, the seed within grows; a double motion within the single entity: the outer toward death, the inner toward life. What grows within me grows perhaps a new body as well as a new spirit, and discards both of the outer ones together.
Letter to Malcolm Edwards, January 29, 1975
[4:135]
Dear Malcolm,
[ . . . ] One thing I’ve meant to write you about (did I?) is the long piece you wrote on Flow My Tears which will appear in England’s sole SF maga zine.31 Malcolm, at the risk of repeating myself in case I said this already, in that piece you expressed certain ideas about my writing which struck me as so important and so meaningful that I was dazzled, and for me, anyhow, it was one of those rare critical works which shed a fundamentally new light on my own work for me, the author. It made sense out of things in my work, aspects, underlying connectives, which I had never discerned properly—but had tried to discern. In particular your remarks about Ubik jolted my mind into furious—and delighted—activity. I’ve sent the piece on to a lady who is writing a post-graduate thesis on my writing, telling her how important, how truly astonishing!, your piece is, in my opinion. When you discuss how the idios kosmos is invaded by what I think you describe as the “strangely different koinos kosmos,” this makes sense out of a lot of what I perpetually write about . . . also, when you discuss how the various idios kosmos-es, whatever the plural is—how a bunch of them may still be only a proliferation, a kind of mutual agreement to extend one idios kosmos, one partial view, from person to person, which is still not a genuine koinos kosmos: Malcolm, you have come up with a totally new concept, in my opinion. To phrase it baldly, there can be shared idios kosmos-es, giving the impres
sion of illusion of a koinos kosmos. (The latter have the aspect of authenticity, the former not, however many people share it.) What comes to my mind in this regard would be when a tyrannical state so manages the news and so manipulates the ideas and thoughts of its citizens, shutting out facts from their purview entirely, that together they collectively share a sort of ersatz koinos kosmos which is nothing more than the Approved Idios Kosmos manufactured synthetically by the state. It could fail to incorporate into it certain vital elements, without which however many people share it and ratify it, it still fails to partake of reality—in the sense that an authentic koinos kosmos should. Multiple incorrectness, however frequently ratified, does not create accuracy, does it not?
A deliberate structure/artifact which they jointly maintain against the threat of reality, against what, if they somehow relaxed, they would find they could allow to seep in . . . as it later does. They have collectively generated their “reality” outside their field of conscious awareness. (At night, in sleep, this mental mechanism dims, and other elements slide in, but are of course ruled out the next day on awakening, as being mere phantasms.) After the bomb blast in Ubik, as I was writing it, I suddenly had to stop, to realize, with a jolt (I recall that day well, as I sat at my typewriter empty headed and empty paged, as it were), with no preconception at all as to how their new world would be, compared with the one they’d been living in. They were alive; they had been killed; all at once, for plot purposes, I needed to imagine a world so-to-speak as it was, which the closest ana log we commonly discuss would be: what is the room like when I’m not in it? I tried to imagine their world for them when it lacked this projection machinery and artifact-like material which they naturally, as do we, maintained constantly, outside awareness. Being dead, they had no force. (“No force, no motion has now/she neither sees nor hears,” or however it goes. Guess it’s “hears and sees,” to go with “trees.”32) I sat at my typewriter for a boundless eternity, imagining their world stripped away, and without realizing it, I was imagining their true koinos kosmos seeping in. What is more thought-provoking is this: what is true of one universe (theirs) would be true of all universes (which would include ours). Thus, the bare-bones koinos kosmos after the bomb blast in Ubik would presumably be ours as well, our authentic koinos kosmos, if we somehow pierced the veils, or rather, if the veils drifted away from between us and it as we relaxed for whatever reason our constant projections which we mutually share. At the time I wrote Ubik it never occurred to me that the world depicted in the latter part of Ubik might in some fundamental way, give or take a bit here and there, be our own, could we see it properly. I wrote the book and forgot how I came to write it; that in point of fact I created a sort of a priori paradigm of what a universe would have to have, minimum, to exist, without reference to what I saw daily in my own. [ . . . ]